Quotes About Certainty

Indeed, even with unlimited resources it is nigh on impossible to prove a negative. How

Truth is not a matter of personal viewpoint.

You don't believe things because they make your life better, you believe them because they're true.

A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.

Does one unceasingly talk about a thousand years and enemies destroyed, if one is certain of these thousand years and this annihilation?

Rene Descartes, in order to raise skeptical doubts about even our firmest certainties, imagined that we might he under the influence of an evil demon, and more modern philosophers have speculated about the possibility of our being brains in vats.

It is a serious matter to destroy a man's faith without replacing it.

after all, there is such a thing as truth.

Whether gods exist or not, there is no way to get absolute certainty about ethics. Without absolute certainty, what do we do? We do the best we can.

If a man really loves a woman, of course he wouldn't marry her for the world if he were not quite sure that he was the best person she could possibly marry.

But in the end, we can't live our lives by 'what if' and 'if only.' We can only do the best we can to the best of our ability based on what we know. That's why the truth is so important.

You have to be pretty tough to be an actor, and you have to be pretty certain what you want. You can't waffle through this business.

If we do everything right, if we do it with absolute certainty, there's still a 30% chance we're going to get it wrong.

The best way to win at a game of chance is to remove chance from the equation.

My hopes were high, and I looked every day for some change to take place. What it was to be I knew not, but that it would come I felt certain if I kept on. One day the chance came.

Intellectuals cannot tolerate the chance event, the unintelligible: they have a nostalgia for the absolute, for a universally comprehensive scheme.

We're so used to running from discomfort, and we're so predictable. If we don't like it, we strike out at someone or beat up on ourselves. We want to have security and certainty of some kind when actually we have no ground to stand on at all.

The professor urged upon Fred that to base one's calculations on unobservables - such as God, such as the soul, such as the atom, such as the elementary particle - was nothing more than a comforting weakness. 'I don't deny that all human beings need comfort. But scientists should not indulge themselves on quite this scale.

Lisa does not think about possible outcomes because a a world in whcih Claudia is not cannot be imagined. Claudia simply is, ever has been and always will be.

He did not want to be young again -- that time had had particular and transcendent horrors -- but the thought of being any older filled him with panic. He could not imagine finding tranquility of soul in old age; if he could only be allowed to mark time for a while all might yet be well, one might suddenly achieve equilibrium, certainty, serenity. There would still be possibilities. Hopes.

God isn't going to scribble across the sky, The shark is gone.

finally there is just one truth: the official version.

When you're in a burning building looking out of the twentieth story window down to the street and all you see is clouds of billowing smoke, you have to choose to believe the firemen below who tell you they have a safety net and it's safe to jump. When the clouds of smoke disappear, you don't have to believe any more: you see it. In this world, it's a leap in the dark; in the next world, it's a leap in the light.

God said it, that settles it.